An Entertaining Interruption

[9/4 Author’s edit] My followers here saw this particular blog post as an explanation of why my Green Corps series Part 3 post was being interrupted, with the explanations that follow. Thought it would be worthwhile to save the material, with just a bit of a re-write.

I have an elemental bias against the EPA stemming from a 2009 statement out of Steve McIntyre’s ClimateAudit blog regarding EPA’s handling of global warming science assessments,

EPA guidelines require that highly influential scientific assessments meet a variety of sensible standards for transparency, data availability and due diligence – policies that CA [ClimateAudit] readers know not to have been implemented by the IPCC.

Not helping matters much for me was more recent news of EPA director Lisa Jackson having a secret email account, and EPA’s response to it and other Freedom of Information Act-requested material being redacted in a way that would make NSA and CIA agents proud.

The August 5 Gold King minewater spill is just another log to throw on EPA’s ‘transparency fire’, it seems. And now, the rest of the unedited blog post after the point where I mentioned my then-uncompleted Green Corps Part 3 post:

……… but its delay in the last few weeks is largely due to the ‘EPA Gold King Mine Release Incident’, where I spotted a particular problem involving photos EPA deleted. Paul Driessen’s 8/18 WUWT guest post mentions my material in his intro, as well as Michael Patrick Leahy’s Breitbart article, about halfway into it. My familiarity with this mining area comes from it being basically in my ‘vacation back yard’ every summer, and too-vague initial media reports about the spill’s location prompted me to find out where it happened. EPA’s own photo log page provided the answer.

before-during-after

[8/27 Update] The pair of EPA photos below that I screencaptured on 8/12/15 (along with the three above and many others) which subsequently vanished from their site on 8/16 have now reappeared in EPA’s redacted documents release today, starting at page 5 of EPA’s “Draft Technical Memorandum [Weston Solutions to EPA]” PDF file, with the particular pair here seen on pg 25 (click to enlarge).

EPA-Weston versions

[9/2 Update] Things just keep getting thicker. EPA stated on Monday, August 31st at their page here that they were releasing “additional photos from the Gold King Mine response“. Many are from their original collection of 191 photos, which they all deleted on 8/16. As seen in my 8/12 partial archive, EPA’s photos were in oldest-to-newest date format with three different viewing formats to choose from.

EPA’s latest 8/31 photo release is at the Flickr.com commercial public photoposting site, having no text descriptions or readily obvious order to them, with the critically important photos from the 8/6 spill not being seen until page 2 there.  It’s particularly strange that the photo seen far down on that page of the ‘unknown visitor’ to the spill as it was happening appears in unredacted form, yet in the Weston Solutions company format that these same photos were released in by EPA on 8/27, the individual was redacted – see page 25 of EPA’s PDF file here.

As of the present time, EPA has not yet restored all of the deleted photos back to their own “Gold King Mine Release Incident” page, where they were originally seen.

EPA-Weston-EPAFlickr versions